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The Media and Trump's Spiraling Decline

Long before he came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his run for the presidency Donald Trump was a malignant narcissist with a questionable grip on objective reality and an inability to tell the truth on just about any topic or issue. In the nine years since, Trump has declined mentally and become increasingly unstable.  Not, of course, that much of the media focuses and honestly reports on Trump's increasingly rambling and incoherent behavior and speech (a column in the Washington Post that looks at Trump's bizarre "interview" with Elon Musk on Monday remains a rarity). While the media launched an obsessive assault on Joe Biden's physical and mental decline which fueled the calls for him to step aside, too many "journalists" continue the pretense that Trump is normal and stupidly treat the election as a horse race and utterly fail the public which deserves a candid assessment of Trump's mental illness and decline that is spiraling before our eyes.  Indeed, had the mainstream media reported honestly on Trump in 2016 and not had an orgasmic frenzy over Hillary Clinton's emails, Trump may well have never been elected and America would have been spared the nightmare from which it still has not escaped. Another column in the Post looks at Trump's decline in plain sight and the media's ongoing failure to do its job of informing the public.  Here are excerpts: 

Trump seems unable to handle reality. His opponent is beating him by multiple metrics, especially crowd size. In response, he posted several obvious lies on Truth Social, claiming that “nobody was there” and that photos and video of Vice President Kamala Harris’s crowds were AI-generated (our own reporters were eyewitnesses to the event). As lawyer and anti-Trump commentator George Conway said on MSNBC, “He has completely lost it. This post is, beyond question, delusional. But it was also inevitable because he realizes … he’s not just running for the presidency, he’s running for his freedom.”

Trump’s nonsense is also meant to sow the seeds of doubt if the election does not go his way. He stated in the same post: “This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING.” As my Post colleague Philip Bump wrote, “the point isn’t to increase Trump’s credibility. It’s to erode everyone else’s. That way, when they accurately report the results in November, Trump can remind his supporters to reject them if necessary.”

Trump might be conditioning voters for another “Stop the Steal.” But then again, he might be just losing it.

A glitch-plagued X interview  . . . only made things worse. People on social media reflected shock at hearing him slur and ramble his way through a softball interview. His obsession with President Joe Biden, who is no longer running, sounds like Trump cannot cope with his actual opponents. A much less alarming performance in the debate effectively ended President Biden’s campaign.

Had the media been conscientiously covering Trump, the public would understand these bizarre outings as part of his noticeable cognitive decline. Trump’s sporadic appearances on the trail alone should be grist for the cable news shows. When they do discuss his mental state, it is often in the context of horserace politics. (Axios commented on his AI delusion: “Trump’s advisers and allies worry he’s spending so much time in an alternative reality that it’s undermining his real-world campaign.” How about asking hard questions about how a party can stand behind someone in an alternative reality?)

If President Biden held a news conference with 162 lies, resorted to laughable fabrications, sounded as bad as Trump did on X and scheduled so few appearances, a swarm of investigative pieces exploring his fitness and commentary asking whether he should leave the race would have ensued. Still, the pretense of normality persists.

It works like this: “Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who is nuts,” Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic, explained last month. “Therefore, it is our responsibility to sand down his rhetoric, to identify any kernel of meaning, to make light of his bizarro statements, to rationalize.” When not one but multiple rants call “into question not only his fitness for office but his basic cognitive abilities,” the media’s refusal to convey Trump’s unfitness amounts to misleading the public.

The worse Trump gets, the more untenable the media’s unwillingness to level with voters becomes. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “[The] false claim by Trump that Harris is generating fake big crowds with AI was a true Captain Queeg moment, maybe the most bat-guano crazy thing I’ve seen in 40 years of covering presidential elections.”

Where does this leave Republicans? The MAGA party is caught in a gloom-and-doom loop, forced to run away from the radical Project 2025 plan, defend an increasingly irrational candidate and make excuses for its unlikable, inept nominee for vice president. One wonders when we will hear and see reports about “Republican panic!” or “Could Republicans dump Trump?” Let’s get real: That sort of coverage is reserved for Democrats. Alas, whatever horserace contest the media continues to present bears little resemblance to the jaw-dropping reality before our eyes.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Is It Morning in Kamala Harris’s America?

Since 1980 and before, Republicans have pushed trickle down economic policies that overall have greatly benefited the super wealthy and the rest of us have received crumbs and fared nowhere near as well.  Yes, in 1980 the nation faced very real economic problems which look nothing like today's strong American economy even if far too many voters are falling for the Trump/GOP/Fox News lies that things are terrible with crime up, inflation still high, and a recession in the offing.  None of these claims are true and in reality crime is down, inflation is down, unemployment is low, and despite interest rates that are too high, the economy remains robust. As a column in the New York Times lays out, more Americans seem to be belatedly noting the true situation and a long desired sense of optimism - something diametrically the opposite of Trump's "American carnage" - is fueling excitement for the Harris/Walz ticket.  Just as importantly, many seem tired of Trump and his endless stream of lies and his increasingly visible age and mental decline. Whatever Trump thinks he's doing in his so-called press conferences, they seem to only be highlighting his deficiencies to all but his most devoted cult followers. Here are highlights from the Times column:

Like everyone who follows this stuff, I’m a bit awe-struck by the polling shift since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket. We still don’t know what will happen on Election Day; Harris could easily lose, despite her improved poll numbers. But if she wins, one way to think about what happened will be to say that Republicans were trying to replay the wrong election.

You see, G.O.P. messaging has been quite explicitly modeled on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, when he asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Applying this approach in 2024 has always been problematic, depending as it does on voters forgetting what 2020, with its soaring unemployment and mass deaths, was really like. But it’s now looking as if this election may bear more resemblance to 1984, when Reagan won a landslide victory with the theme “Morning in America.”

Before you dismiss this comparison, consider the actual state of America in 1984, which was a lot more problematic than the legend — carefully cultivated by conservatives over the years — would have it. In November of that year, the unemployment rate was 7.2 percent, compared with 4.3 percent now; inflation was just over 4 percent, compared with the current 2.9 percent. The homicide rate was much higher than the rate today.

But unemployment and inflation had come down from their peaks a few years earlier, and many Americans felt that the nation was emerging from the despondency that gripped it in 1980. In retrospect, the celebration was premature . . . . the hollowness of “Morning in America” wouldn’t become apparent until much later.

The parallel with current politics is that the state of America in 2024 isn’t just objectively very good, particularly when compared with other wealthy nations; it has also been improving rapidly along multiple dimensions. The percentage of prime-age Americans employed is at a 23-year high. Inflation is down by about two-thirds from its peak in 2022. Violent crime, which rose significantly during Donald Trump’s last year in office, has been falling fast.

Yet voters didn’t seem to be feeling the good news, and until recently Trump seemed to be running a successful campaign centered on false claims that crime is “through the roof” and that we may be in “the throes of a depression.” Oh, and that the price of bacon has quadrupled.

You may say that people don’t care that inflation — the rate at which prices are rising — is down, that they care only about the fact that prices are higher than they were. But in November 1984, consumer prices were 21 percent higher than when Reagan took office, which didn’t stop him from getting credit for curbing inflation . . . .

No, increasingly it seems the reason the good news wasn’t getting through to voters was the messenger. Very good things have happened on Biden’s watch, many of them attributable to his startlingly bold policies. He will surely receive a much deserved hero’s welcome at next week’s Democratic National Convention, and future historians will, I believe, rate his presidency extremely highly. But for various reasons — his age, the fact that inflation surged in 2021 and ’22 and maybe just his personal style — voters weren’t willing to give him credit for his achievements.

Now that Harris is the Democratic nominee, however, the vibes have shifted.

A Financial Times poll showing that voters prefer Harris on the economy may be an outlier, but there are other polls showing that Trump’s once sizable (and utterly undeserved) advantage on that issue has been greatly eroded. . . . . and Harris leads by wide margins on abortion and health care.

Now, I’m not saying that Harris, who appears to be leading but not by much, will win. . . . . Still, there is a real sense in which this election suddenly looks more like 1984 than like 1980, with Harris, not Trump, playing the Reagan role. Trump is running as the candidate of American carnage, insisting that things are terrible, which was sort of true in 1980 but isn’t true now; along with his ranting about crowd sizes and all that, he’s coming across as a whiner.

Meanwhile, Harris is running as the candidate of optimism and hope, declaring that we have triumphed over adversity — which we have. The truth is that there was ample reason to feel good about America a month or two ago, but voters weren’t willing to believe it as long as Biden was running. With Harris as the Democrats’ standard-bearer, Biden’s achievements may finally pay off politically.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Trump Endorses a Racist Theory

I have long believed that what attracts much of the MAGA base to Donald Trump is his open racism and his effort to mainstream white supremacy.  The MAGA base is terrified of anyone who looks different than them, loves differently, or holds to a different religious faith.  Yet, underneath it all, skin color is the determinative factor and these people want to maintain their perceived white privilege and claims of superiority.  Some of those I know who support Trump may claim that they are not racists, but when you look at the overall circumstances, there is truly no other plausible explanation for their fealty to a man who I once thought would be anathema to the morality these people  have claimed to embrace in the past.  I continue to be shocked by some of the Facebook post by these individuals who I suspect would say they and I disagree on politics, but in truth we differ on matters of basic morality.  Now, with Trump freaking out over the change presidential campaign and Kamala Harris' rise in the polls, both Trump and his campaign appear to be going all in on a shockingly racist theme pitting whites and non-whites against one another.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this renewed racism and the lies it promotes.  Here are highlights (the image above is from Trump's campaign): 

Yesterday, the official Trump War Room campaign account on X posted a picture of a peaceful residential neighborhood, which it captioned “Your Neighborhood Under Trump.” The tranquil image was juxtaposed with a chaotic scene of Black and Hispanic migrants who’d arrived in New York last summer, captioned: “Your Neighborhood Under Kamala.” “Import the third world,” the post declared. “Become the third world.”

This racist post is consistent with the tone that the Trump campaign has taken in recent weeks—one even uglier than that of months and years past—as the former president struggles to gain traction against Kamala Harris. Like Donald Trump himself, the War Room account has a singular obsession: It regularly highlights stories about migrant crime, posting pictures of Black or brown men who have immigrated to the U.S. and been arrested. A necessary note: There is no evidence of a migrant-led crime spike, or of higher crime rates in cities with the greatest numbers of migrants. Research suggests that immigrants are less likely than their native-born counterparts to be arrested. Trump and his campaign’s obsession with crimes committed by migrants—and their relative silence on other dangers Americans face, such as mass shootings—speaks for itself.

The drumbeat seems to have gotten louder this week. Yesterday, the War Room account also reposted a clip of a Fox News segment about a Haitian migrant charged with raping a child, adding, “Life under President Trump: Increased child tax credits. Life under Kamala Harris: Increased child rape.” The list goes on and on.

None of this is new for Trump, who has a long and well-documented history of racist remarks, and whose campaigns have been built on stoking fears of migrants. Indeed, migrant crime has been a consistent Trumpian theme since he came down a golden escalator in 2015 . . .  As a candidate in 2015, Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and according to The Washington Post, he referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” while president.

Trump has never backed off. His campaign is now pushing that same line, but with a grotesque twist. They are hammering on the theme that it is Trump’s Black female opponent who is responsible for all of this supposed chaos. “Kamala Harris IMPORTS rape and plunder into our communities,” another Trump War Room post declared yesterday.

Perhaps even more worrying is that the “neighborhood” post went beyond Trump’s fixation on migrant crime to highlight his campaign’s embrace of the “Great Replacement” theory—the fear that Black and brown migrants will displace white Americans in the voting booth, the workplace, and a neighborhood near you. Once confined to the white-nationalist fringes, the theory was popularized in part by the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson . . .

Now Trump’s own campaign is amplifying these fears of a “Third World” takeover. Trump has taken his racism far beyond a dog whistle, and as even a cursory scroll through the War Room account shows, his campaign is not attempting to hide it.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Trump Is Laying the Groundwork to Deny Election Results

Given Donald Trump's bizarre statements about the crowds at Kamala Harris' campaign events - he has claimed they are not real and that images of the large crowds have been generated by AI - it is difficult to know with certainty whether Trump is merely delusional or whether it is part of a plan to set the stage for the MAGA base to again insist the 2024 election is rigged if their cult leader is defeated at the ballot box.  Perhaps the best answer is that Trump is both delusional and at the same time laying the groundwork for a reprise of the Big Lie.  The reality is that his adoring cultist followers believe whatever he says no matter how big the lie and/or the total lack of factual support for the endless stream of lies coming from Trump's mouth.  It remains baffling as to how/why the MAGA base is so willing to accept any and every lie, including some people who I was thought were moral and decent people.  A column in the New York Times looks at how Trump may be further brainwashing his base to ensure they reject any election results where Trump doesn't win.  Here are column excerpts:

When Donald Trump says something ludicrous and unhinged, it is often difficult to tell if he is acting out of feral political calculation or narcissistic injury. We saw this on Sunday, when he claimed that Kamala Harris had used A.I. to fake an image of an enthusiastic crowd greeting her when she arrived in Michigan.

“There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!,” Trump wrote on his vanity website Truth Social.

His argument, such as it was, was based on a conspiracy theory floating around febrile corners of the internet that purported to find evidence of Harris’s deception in her plane’s reflection. . . . “This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING — And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”

One way to read this post is that Trump is delusional. He can’t cope with Harris besting him on the metric he’s long valued the most — the size of his audience — and so is denying reality and having a tantrum. But however disordered Trump’s mind might be, I suspect there’s also a sort of strategy at work here. He is helping his supporters build a rationale for rejecting the election results if Harris wins.

Those who refuse to believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election often cite modest turnout at Biden rallies, or enormous audiences at Trump ones, as proof that the election was rigged. This was always an absurd argument; if there was a direct connection between crowd sizes and vote share, Bernie Sanders would have been a Democratic presidential nominee. But it felt true to the members of Trump’s base, who’ve convinced themselves that their movement represents the true expression of the national will.

Some Trump fans certainly understand that they constitute a numerical minority in this country. But others are cloistered enough to believe Trump when he insists that he is overwhelmingly beloved, as he did at his Mar-a-Lago news conference last week, when he claimed that the MAGA movement encompasses 75 percent of Americans. I doubt many people registered this lie, jammed as it was amid so many others. But some of his die-hard fans heard it and took heart.

[T]he conviction that Trump is uniquely popular makes it easier to justify the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen. It also validates the belief that Trump will lose in November only if it’s stolen again. The ebullient throngs at Harris’s events — as well as her climbing poll numbers — threaten the worldview that sustains election denialism, and so they must be dismissed. For many MAGA adherents on social media, it’s an article of faith that enthusiasm for Harris has been manufactured as part of a “psyop” against Trump. Whether or not Trump buys into this self-soothing fantasy, he is encouraging his followers to get swept up in it.

As someone who very much wants to see Trump defeated, I’ll be pleased if he spends the next few months ranting about crowd sizes and telling himself that he’s ahead even if the polls say otherwise. But while the MAGA movement’s self-deception won’t help it win the election, it could spur chaos in the election’s aftermath. By insisting that Harris’s support isn’t real, Trump is bolstering the idea that if she prevails, it won’t be legitimate.

And while there’s nothing new in Trump refusing to accept electoral defeat, in 2024, his acolytes have embedded themselves in the systems that are supposed to make our elections function. A Rolling Stone investigation published in July found almost 70 election deniers serving as swing-state election officials.

In Georgia, the state board of elections, dominated by pro-Trump members, recently adopted a rule that will empower these election deniers. . . . A report from the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy organization at N.Y.U., suggests that the rule should cause concern but not panic: “If a rogue official refuses to certify an election, every state has enforcement mechanisms in place to make sure that certification proceeds on time.” But even if the system holds, Trumpist officials are likely to cause delay, confusion and uncertainty over the election’s outcome, all justified by the big lie that America has a MAGA majority.

The people who refuse to accept that Kamala Harris’s crowds are real are telling us they won’t accept that her votes are either.

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Trump Can’t Deal With Harris’s Success

Recently, George Conway described Donald Trump's accusations that crowds shown at campaign events for Kamala Harris were photo shopped or produced by AI as being akin to Adolph Hitler in the Fuhrer bunker in the last days of his regime where he ordered around military units that no longer existed.  However accurate the description may or may not be, what is clear is that Trump is not dealing well with Harris' rise in the polls or the high enthusiasm surrounding her campaign events which are far larger than his own.   Rather than having a disciplined issue and policy based message, Trump is increasingly being his normal vile self and in the process spotlighting his own failings and lack of mental stability.  Add in the fiasco that JD Vance is proving to be as Trump's vice presidential pick, and things are not good or happy in Trump's reality free world.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at Trump's lashing out and how Kamala Harris needs to maintain her momentum while allowing Trump to potentially self-destruct.  Here are excerpts:

Kamala Harris has had as good a three-week stretch as any presidential candidate in modern American history.

When Joe Biden dropped out on July 21, less than a month after his catastrophic debate performance against Donald Trump, the Democratic Party was on course to be defeated in a landslide. Today, Vice President Harris is slightly ahead of Trump in national polls, and in three important swing states—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—new surveys by The New York Times and Siena College show her leading by four points, 50–46, among likely voters.

Since May, when Biden was the nominee, Harris has gained seven points in Pennsylvania, five points in Wisconsin, and four points in Michigan. The Democratic National Convention, which should give her an additional boost, begins next week. By the time it ends, fewer than 75 days will be left until the November 5 election.

The data are pretty clear. Harris has electrified the Democratic Party; a Wall Street Journal survey found that 93 percent of Democrats now support her. Among Democrats, voter satisfaction with their choice of candidate has increased a staggering 27 percent in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan since May. So-called double-haters—voters who are dissatisfied with both major-party choices—have for now broken for Harris. In addition, positive views of Harris have increased 11 percent in less than a month.

Many Americans who would otherwise vote for the Democratic ticket couldn’t bring themselves to do so as long as Biden was the nominee; his decline was simply too alarming. His debate against Trump cemented those concerns, making it clear to me within minutes that he couldn’t win the election. . . . . Biden’s decision to drop out of the race released enormous pent-up energy and enthusiasm among Democrats. They immediately unified around Harris. Long-standing divisions within the party were cast aside. The Democrats were back in the game.

Biden’s impairments also masked the extent of Trump’s flaws as a candidate. The former president exhibits “epic scars & vulnerabilities,” in the words of David Axelrod, chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. Trump has been disliked by a majority of Americans from almost the moment he ran in 2016, and their misgivings have only deepened as Trump’s behavior has grown more unhinged, narcissistic, and lawless.

Biden’s abrupt departure deeply unsettled Trump. His entire campaign was built to defeat Biden. Trump . . . . concluded that the race was won. And it was, until Biden stepped aside and Harris stepped up.

Trump, enraged and rattled, is reverting to his feral ways. We see it in his preposterous claim that Harris’s crowds, which are both noticeably larger and far more enthusiastic than his own, are AI-generated; in his resentful attacks against the popular Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, and his wife, because Kemp didn’t aid Trump in his effort to overthrow the election; and in his attack on Harris’s racial identity.

At precisely the moment when Trump needs to elevate his performance, to the degree that such a thing is even possible, he’s gone back to his most natural state: erratic, crazed, transgressive, self-indulgent, and enraged. One by-product of this is that Trump has provided no coherent or focused line of attack on Harris. . . . . he prospect of not just being beaten, but being beaten by a woman of color, has sent Trump into a frenzy in a way almost nothing else could.

That the Democratic Party was rejuvenated by Biden’s withdrawal is hardly surprising. But very few people anticipated how skilled Harris has been as a presidential candidate. . . .It’s not simply that she’s made few missteps so far, which is itself impressive. It’s that she’s hit all the right notes, projected self-assurance, and framed the race in just the way she wants: In contrast with Trump, she is future-oriented, a change agent, at ease and joyful.

Harris and Walz seem to be having great fun on the campaign trail. The contrast with Trump and J. D. Vance, who are dystopian, perennially aggrieved, and weird, to use the adjective of the day, couldn’t be greater.

Harris, right now at least, isn’t simply the nominee of the Democratic Party. She seems to have created a movement, the closest parallel to which is Obama’s 2008 campaign.

Something else, and something quite important, has changed. The whole landscape of the campaign has been transformed. The rise of Harris instantly cast Trump in a new light. He formerly seemed more ominous and threatening, which, whatever its political drawbacks, signaled strength; now he seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis.

Malignant narcissists go to great lengths to hide their fears and display a false or idealized self. Criticism targets the persona. Mockery, by contrast, can tap very deep fears of being exposed as flawed or weak. When the mask is the target, people with Trump’s psychological profile know how to fight back. Mockery, though, can cause them to unravel.

I would be the last person on Earth to question the devotion of Trump supporters. But at the moment, it really is beginning to look like The Trump Show is reaching the end of its run.

This might be wishful thinking on my part, and too much is at stake to indulge in complacency. But what will likely define the rest of the race is Trump, a tempest in his mind, raging, raging, and raging again. Trump will go down in American history as many things, almost all of them poisonous. And the label he most fears is the one he now worries will ever be affixed to him: loser.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Harris is Beating Trump by Transcending Him

Outside of MAGA cultists I suspect many Americans - likely the majority - are exhausted with Donald Trump's never ending narcissism, fear mongering (usually based on racism) and efforts to divide the nation along racial and religious lines. This in turn has seemingly created a longing for something different and an escape from Trump and everything he is peddling.  It's a longing that the Harris/Walz ticket appears to be connecting with and are riding with a forward looking message instead of Trump/MAGA's effort to take the nation backward in time at the expense of millions of Americans' civil rights and freedoms. Time will tell if this momentum can be maintained, but so far Trump/Vance campaign has been unable to find an effective strategy to counter the Democrat surge.  Moreover, Trump can never stop talking about himself rather than addressing the wants and needs of citizens outside the Christofascist and white supremacist base of the modern Republican Party.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the changed trajectory of the 2024 campaign and the GOP's inability to successfully negatively define the Democrat ticket.  Here are column highlights: 

The sudden and radical shift in the trajectory of the 2024 campaign owes to more than the replacement of President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. To a degree that’s still not fully appreciated, Harris has embraced an entirely new strategy: She’s not just pushing back against Donald Trump’s politics of cultural division. She’s bidding to transcend it.

Choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate reinforces the move away from clichés about “coastal politics” and “cultural elites.” Instead, she wants to fight on specific, practical measures government can take to improve lives, from family leave to expansions of health coverage. Both Harris and Walz are speaking a soothing and — to pick up on Democrats’ favorite virtue these days — joyful language of patriotism and national unity.

You could tell the Trump campaign was thrown off by the Walz pick when the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, attacked the camo-wearing, gun-owning, small-town Midwestern schoolteacher as a “San Francisco-style liberal.” . . . . The tired misfire speaks to how dependent the GOP is on stereotypes about who “liberals” are and what “liberalism” means.

Trump and Vance want liberals to be Ivy League-educated people (which describes both members of the Republican ticket but neither of the two Democrats) who look down their noses at “flyover country” and disrespect the values of small towns and the countryside. They absolutely do not want to deal with a liberalism that extols “community” and “freedom” (two of Harris’s favorite words) and favors a government active in areas where most voters favor more public action to ease their circumstances.

The contrast Harris is trying to bring home was underscored last Thursday in dueling appearances by the two nominees. Standing amid the faux-gilt of his Mar-a-Lago hotel, Trump, who has largely been homebound at a crucial point in the campaign, talked a lot about himself.

Meanwhile, Harris was in Michigan at a United Auto Workers local flanked by Walz and Shawn Fain, the union’s visionary president, to extol “the dignity of work” and the value of collective action.

While Mar-a-Lago Trump called the United States as a “very, very sick country right now,” Harris spoke an actual populist language with a strong emphasis on patriotism.

“Our campaign is about saying, ‘We trust the people, we see the people, we know the people.’ You know one of the things I love about our country? We are a nation of people who believe in those ideals that were foundational to what made us so special as a nation. … We love our country.”

The (perhaps unfair) irony is that such sentiments seemed old-fashioned from Biden but sound fresh when put forward by a younger woman — from California, for goodness’ sake! — whom no one can think of as a fogey. . . . . and harness the nation’s exhaustion with Trump’s gloomy acrimony.

When a literally straight-shooting football coach like Walz becomes the adviser to his high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance because he doesn’t like seeing LGBTQ kids bullied, he moves discussions of sexual identity from academic gender theory to simple, small-town decency. When Harris says, “We love our country,” pay attention to those words “we” and “our.” Harris and Walz are waging war on “inflammatory symbolic politics.” And, yes, it’s a joy to watch.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Sunday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

Harris Is Winning the All-Important Battle — of Vibes

The Trump-Vance campaign continues to seemingly reel from the transformed presidential race and so far other than personal insults and name calling has not been able to come up with a focused and thought out response to Harris-Walz.  In addition, the Democrat ticket is surrounded by a level of excitement that surpasses that of all but the most devoted MAGA cultists who worship the foul orange one.  Many are speculating whether such Democrat momentum can be maintained and whether some working and middle class Republican voters can be convinced to stop voting against their own economic interest - they gain nothing from the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda nor Trump's proposed tariffs - and time and time again follow their emotions and allow themselves to be manipulated by GOP culture war memes.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the current situation and the data that shows that many voters follow emotion rather than any rational thought process in casting their votes.  Here are column excerpts:

There has been a tendency among Democrats to get exasperated at the American people for not voting their material interests — for policies that would help them better their conditions. They wonder (as the title of a book raising the concern goes) “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” but what they really mean is, “What’s the Matter with America?”

In recent years, however, a growing body of scholarship has shown that people don’t tend to vote rationally, but rather use voting to express themselves in emotional, ideological and moral ways. This view of human behavior, . . . . sees elections as involving a great deal of intangible intuition and passion. Voters choose from the gut and then rationalize their choice, consciously or not. Kamala Harris’s campaign seems premised on this latter, intuition-based approach.

Ever since the vice president became the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, Harris has run a remarkably focused and disciplined campaign, one that seems deliberately light on substance and high on feelings. . . . .Harris has not yet given extensive interviews or done news conferences which would force her to detail her positions on specific issues. Instead, she has introduced herself to the American people in entirely human terms, presenting herself as a dynamic, warm, funny and optimistic person. It’s heavy on vibes, and, so far, it seems to be working.

Her running mate pick follows the same pattern. The practical choice would have been Josh Shapiro, the smart, effective and popular governor of the swing state with the most electoral votes. Instead, she chose the governor of a bluer state — but one who projects an image that has resonated throughout the country: a folksy, affable, kindhearted man. The Tim Walz pick reminds us that, sometimes, EQ is as important as IQ.

This is a turning of the tables. Donald Trump and the Republicans have tended to be masters of the politics of emotion, emphasizing strength and evoking fear. But for now, Harris’s hopefulness — the sense of “joy” that Walz speaks of on the campaign trail — appears to be dominating.

There is also a turning of the tables in another sense. In every presidential election over the past three decades until 2020, the Democrats, now the party of the college-educated class, nominated someone who had a degree from Harvard or Yale at the top of the ticket. But now, Harris and Walz are continuing the turn away from the Ivy League begun by Biden and Harris — and it is the Republicans who have an all-Ivy ticket (with one billionaire and one venture capitalist).

So far, the Harris approach has allowed her to right the sinking Democratic ship. Solidly blue states that had turned into potential toss-ups are now back in the blue column. She is leading Trump in some national polls and is effectively tied in the swing states.

But this momentum probably has a ceiling. America is evenly divided. . . . . To prevail, Harris will have to start filling in the substance of her campaign. The Democrats’ biggest strength is the issue of abortion, and the vice president has been eloquent and effective on it. Their biggest weakness is immigration, which galvanizes Republicans and even some independents. Harris has been speaking much more about it than Biden did — and she has also been given a gift by Trump.

When he forced Republicans this year to abandon the bipartisan immigration bill — which was basically a Republican wish list — he gave the Democrats an escape hatch on the issue. Rather than having to defend their decidedly weak and hapless stand on the collapse of the asylum process, they could now simply point out that they supported a bipartisan, tough crackdown at the border — and Trump did not. Harris has already said she will try to pass this bill if she wins, and she should go further by pledging to junk the entire asylum system and build a new one.

Will the Harris strategy work? It’s early still, and it will be a tough, close contest. She has real vulnerabilities. But, so far, she has chosen a somewhat unusual path that could pay off in November.

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The Truth About Trump’s Press Conference

Donald Trump should be the poster child for what decent, responsible parents do NOT want their children to be - a constant liar, bully, totally self-centered, fond of name calling and violence, and living in his own narcissistic fantasy world (and unable to speak at more than a 5th grade level).  Evangelicals through their blind fealty to the man have shown their actual moral bankruptcy and underscored that their previous statements that character and morality matter were simply lies.  Equally disturbing are those I know who are supporting Trump for unfathomable reasons that leave me wondering if I ever really knew these people at all - were they racists and gay haters the whole time?  The only thing that may explain their behavior is that many seemingly only get their "news" from right wing propaganda and conspiracy theory sites, so they are in a fantasy world themselves.  

Most troubling, however, is the effort of much of the news media to report on Trump as if he were  a sane and normal candidate which is anything but the truth.   Having first voted in the 1972 presidential election and been politically involved for decades, I have seen a lot of candidates and I assure you Trump is neither normal or sane either in my view and that of many medical practitioners.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at Trump's bizarre press conference this past week which was an effort to grab back some headlines in the face of the plentiful coverage of the Harris-Walz ticket which is drawing far larger crowds than the far smaller Trump or Vance campaign rallies.  Most of what Trump said was untrue or simply batshit crazy not that one would know it from many supposedly premier news organizations.  Here are highlights from The Atlantic: 

Donald Trump’s public events are a challenge for anyone who writes about him. . . . so much of what Trump said seems too bonkers to have come from a former president and the nominee of a major party that journalists are left trying to piece together a story as if Trump were a normal person. This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines.

Consider Trump’s press conference yesterday in Florida. Trump has been lying low since President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, at least in terms of public appearances. But Vice President Kamala Harris, the new Democratic nominee, and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz, are gaining a lot of great press, and so Trump decided it was time to emerge from his sanctuary.

Trump, predictably, did an afternoon concert of his greatest hits, including “Doctors and Mothers Are Murdering Babies After They’re Born,” “Putin and Xi Love Me and I Love Them,” and “Gas Used to Be a Buck-Eighty-Something a Gallon.” But the new material was pretty shocking.

Trump not only declared that mothers are killing babies in the delivery room—he’s been saying that for years—but added the incomprehensible claim that liberals, conservatives, and independents alike are very happy that abortion has been returned to the states.

He said (again) that the convicted January 6 insurrectionists have been treated horribly, but this time he added that no one died during the assault on the Capitol. (In fact, four people died that day.) He made his usual assertion that Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he’d been in office, but this time he added how much he looked forward to getting along with the Iranians, despite also bragging about how he tanked the nuclear deal with them.

He claimed that Harris was sliding in the polls, a standard Trump trope in talking about his opponents, but he added that he was getting crowd sizes up to 30 times hers at his rallies. . . . . he followed all of this by going for the gold: His rallies are not just big, they’re the biggest ever.

Then things got even weirder.

Trump claimed that former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said bad things about Harris while he and Trump were on a helicopter together. Oh—and the helicopter was in trouble . . . none of this ever happened. Trump may have confused Willie Brown with former California Governor Jerry Brown, with whom Trump once shared an uneventful helicopter ride.

The issue is that a former president is frighteningly delusional, and if any other candidate had done this—Biden was roasted over stories that were obscure but turned out to be true—it would dominate the news with understandable alarm about the well-being of the candidate.

Reporters might listen to Trump and then understandably be reluctant to start typing stories that must feel like spec scripts for The West Wing pieced together by a creative-writing circle . . . . Instead, The New York Times ran this headline: “Trump Tries to Wrestle Back Attention at Mar-a-Lago News Conference.” The Washington Post said: “Trump Holds Meandering News Conference, Where He Agrees to Debate Harris.” The British paper The Independent got closer with: “Trump Holds Seemingly Pointless Press Conference Filled With False Claims,” but CNN went with “Trump Attacks Harris and Walz During First News Conference . . .

All of these headlines are technically true, but they miss the point: The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him. Any of those would have been important—and accurate—headlines.

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